Extracting wav Audio File from mp4 Video with FFmpeg in Ubuntu

 April 24, 2020      Stardate: 73778.3     Tagged as: Ubuntu FFmpeg GoPro Davinci Resolve 16

In a previous post I showed a work-around for importing H.264 mp4 files into the free Linux version of Davinci Resolve 16 (DR16). For many reasons, I made the decision to purchase the full Studio version. This lets me directly import mp4 videos but, the audio still doesn’t work. Linux DR16 doesn’t import AAC audio. I read on the BlackMagic forums that it is a licensing thing.

Since we are on Ubuntu and are comfortable with the command line and scripts…right??… we can just use ffmpeg to pop us out a PCM encoded .wav file that can be imported into the DR16 timeline and linked to the clip.

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -acodec pcm_s16le -ac 1 -ar 16000 input_audio.wav

You could also turn this into a Nautilus shell script and run it by right-clicking on an .mp4 file, the instructions are here.